5.23.2020

New e-book: VORTEX


"Vortex: Modulations on Dynamic Unity" is a work articulating philosophy, modern science, mysticism, art and politics, unified by the concept of the vortex. In turbulent times, like ours, "Vortex" offers a relation of knowledges in life – the transknowledges – allowing a better apprehension of the world we live in, proposing alternative practices, such as the "vortex exercise" meditation created by the author and describe in the book, and new possibilities for social life, such as the Vortexa village.

Nelson Job is the creator of the transknowledges conceptual and experiential field, PhD and transdiciplinary researcher about consciousness, teacher and psychologist.



12.19.2019

The misery of science and philosophy without esotericism


this article in portuguese HERE
Nelson Job
(translated by Pedro Ribeiro)

The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world 
deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
Kafka[1]



                 There is a deep resonance between magic, philosophy, science and art, with a special emphasis on the confluences of Hermeticism, philosophy of difference and modern Physics. Hermeticism is a magical way of knowledge inspired by Ancient Egypt, which migrates via Alexandria, during the Middle Ages, to all Europe. This shows how esoteric knowledge is important for Western knowledge. There are proven Hermetic influences on Kepler’s science (CONNOR, 2005), who worked as an astrologer for Roman-German Emperor Rudolph II, and Newton (DOBBS, 1994). On the second case, the theory of gravity itself was inspired by alchemy. Newton even translated to English the most important alchemical text: “The Emerald Table” (DOBBS, 2002). In broad terms, different from a rationalist view of the History of Science, classical science is not born “in opposition” to magic, but exactly the contrary: classic science is born from magic. In his brilliant book Esoterism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, Historian Wouter Hanegraaff (2012) says in his conclusion that, given the present studies, it would be absurd to exclude, for instance, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola – two great mystical philosophers – from the History of Philosophy, as well as exclude astrology (which influenced astronomy) and alchemy from the History of Science.

            We will use the passage from alchemy to chemistry as a monad of the relations between esotericism, philosophy and science. Alchemy began with the archaic magical-ritualistic techniques of healers, miners and blacksmiths, being constituted as a body of knowledge in China, India and Mesopotamia circa 600 B.C. (VARGAS, 2009). In Egypt, alchemical knowledge arrived a little later, with the philosophy of Plotinus. The first known Egyptian alchemist is Zosimos, from 300 A.D., author of the first distinctly alchemical texts. Zosimos probably was an apprentice of Mary the Jewess, who named the famous bain-marie method, indicating that alchemy was important for Judaism, since there were many Jewish alchemists, possibly the first to believe in the transmutation of metals. There are speculations that Moses was also an alchemist (PATAI, 2009).

            Alchemy was used by Swiss analyst Carl Jung (1991) as a symbol of the workings of the unconscious. His book Psychology and Alchemy includes his famous use of alchemy in the interpretation of the dreams – considered alchemical by Jung – of physician Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize winner for Quantum Mechanics. They became friends, and from this friendship was born one of Jung’s most important concepts, synchronicity (PAULI & JUNG, 2001). However, Hanegraaff (2012) points that Jung’s interpretation reduces alchemy to a mere psychological symbolism. It is important to stress that alchemy was a laboratory practice, an inspiration for the scientific lab of the present. Alchemy is also the main source of information of Renaissance physician Paracelsus (BALL, 2009), a university teacher, researcher, author of many relevant medical treatises, whose work influenced the advent of homeopathy centuries later.

            To mention Paracelsus as a noteworthy medical author can seem odd to skeptical readers. However, a closer study of his work shows that Paracelsus possessed a scientific mind, as well as a magical one (BALL, 2009). Later studies, such as the History of Science by George Sarton, created the illusion that, among other prejudiced and biased affirmations, science is cumulative, progressive and marked by skepticism, while magic would be irrational (HANEGRAAFF, 2012). This invention of a certain “folkloric”, that is, immutable magic, ignores the continuous sophistication observed during the passage of many centuries, in mystic authors like Plotinus, the anonymous Medieval authors who used the pseudonym of Hermes Trismegistus – organized in the Corpus Hermeticum – and Isaac Newton, who added concepts, practices and other details along the history of magic. In the reading of these and many other mystic authors can be perceive a progression and an unfolding of concepts of magic that still abide nowadays, in works like Psicomagia, by movie director and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky (2009), and Liber Null and Psychonaut, by Peter J. Carroll (2016), this later being one of the creators of the so-called Chaos Magick, one of the rare examples of a consistent articulation of Quantum Mechanics interpretations with magic. It is commonplace to say that the considerations about oxygen made by Lavoisier – after the death of Paracelsus – would generate an “anti-Paracelsian” medicine, at the same time they inaugurated chemistry. Nothing in the opus of Paracelsus indicates that he would reject oxygen, much to the contrary: he seemed enthusiastic about new discoveries (BALL, 2009).

            To apprehend the importance and consistence of alchemy, we can quote the conclusion of Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb’s study (2009), where she says “the process that happened was dynamic, alchemy did not fall by itself – due to its many contradictions – but by the contradictions that its context caused in the new system of thought”. What this excerpt makes clear is that there is a change of mentalities with Illuminism and the French Revolution. The famous episode of German chemist Friedrich Kekulé’s dream – where dreaming with the Ourobouros, the alchemical figure of the snake eating its own tail, provided him the insight for the disposition of the atom in the benzene molecule– is an excellent representation of the passage from alchemy to chemistry. Kekulé would become one of the pioneers of organic chemistry, whose separation between the inorganic and the organic marks the loss of importance of a magical animism in the increasingly scientific imaginary of Europe and the rest of the world. This episode is part of a long process of dualism and separatism that happened to thinking. It is necessary to provide a summary of this process.


“The decisive moment of human development
is continually at hand.”
Kafka

History has some passionate debates about if there ever was a “matriarchy”. At any rate, if we depart from a historically identifiable advent of patriarchy, the use of cold weapons, we can establish a great initial separatism process: the social division between masters and slaves. In Ancient Egypt, at the beginning of the dynasties of the Pharaohs (middle of the Ancient Empire [circa 2680 B.C. 2190 B.C.]), the entire society was shaped by the concept of Ma’at, an immanent goddess of justice and truth (NUNES CARREIRA, 1994). To this must be added a society where philosophy, religion and politics were immanent, principally in relation to the figure of the pharaoh. The goddess Ma’at was present in the cosmos; she was the cosmos. During the New Empire (circa 1550 B.C. – 1070 B.C.), there is a process of transcendentalization of Ma’at, which culminates with the decadence of the Empire and a growing individualism in Egypt. During this historical process, Ma’at ceases to be an immanent goddess to submit to a single God, becoming a State myth, a “sentiment” of justice. This individualism will become increasingly sophisticated in a separation between subject and object, where there is a migration of the immanent ethics of Ma’at to the “love thy neighbor” of Judaic-Christian morals. 

            The dimension of a “neighbor” or “other” is only elicited in a cosmovision where subject and object are separate, even if “love your neighbor as thyself” is an invitation to an immanent vision: me and the other are one. However, the passage from the initial Christianity to another, after many Councils, to an increasingly transcendent Christianity, altered its original message: from I am the other, to “being concerned” with the other, that is, ethical information degenerated in a moral rule. The precept “love thy neighbor like thyself”, in its “immanent version”, resonates with the maxim from the Hindu Upanishads,Tat twam asi”, which in the Advaita Vedanta interpretation would be something like “Thou art That”, an eminently non-dual way of knowledge, very similar to Spinozism, which will be mentioned below (OM & JOB, 2017).

            A new step on this separation will happen in Greece. Asia and Egypt had commercial exchanges with Greece via Persia (MCEVILLEY, 2002). One consequence of this, among others, is that all the Shamanism present in Pythagoras and his famous theorem was already present in geometric form in the pyramids of Egypt. Greek rationalism inherits the final phase of Egyptian thought, once an undifferentiated blend of knowledges that culminates in a Greece whose philosophy is born by separating itself from myths and rites. There is a rationalist political act when a certain History inaugurates Greek thought. For instance, the existence of a philosophy immanent to religion, as in Egypt, was abandoned. Such political act is indeed relevant to understand what happens in the present in relation to medicine and the concept of health.
            Parmenides inaugurates this divided Greece stimulating what became an apology of permanence, to which Western Philosophy becomes, in a mode of speaking, addicted. Platonism magnifies separatism with its exaltation of the World of Ideas in detriment to the sensible, inferior world of the Simulacrum. Scholasticism expands this rift by building a world separate from God. Descartes distinguishes body and mind as different Natures (DELEUZE, 2006). During this same Cartesian 17th century, there is a radical change in the ontology of language, in an unfolding of the medieval debate between Nominalism and Realism. If, up to this point, in the “Western” imaginary, the word was immanent to the thing, in the middle of the 17th Century the word is dissociated from the thing, only representing it, this aspect being important to discredit witchcraft (CLARK, 2006). Kant, in his turn, made the Thing-in-Itself inaccessible to the mind, which finally will slip into Positivism, i.e., science is unable to reach reality, and can only deal with phenomena (PINGUELLI ROSA, 2005). Modern man feel inexorably isolated from the comos; a “humanity” destitute from its cosmic scope is invented.


“How is it possible to rejoice in the world except by fleeing to it?”
Kafka

            Now we can understand better the processes that happened: the passage from astrology to astronomy and from alchemy to chemistry culminated in an act, that is, the exclusion of immanence from the philosophy of that way of knowledge. Astrology promoted the immanence between our lives (micro) and celestial orbits of the stars (macro). Alchemy promoted immanence between life (coagulated in a certain body, “micro”) and the elements (that are in the world and are the world, “macro”). With the removal of philosophy, which since the Egyptians was immanent to all activities, astronomy became a mere description of celestial movements, with nothing to add to our lives, and chemistry became a combination of the elements, without any immanent meaning to life, except for the description of those chemical processes in the world. Philosophy degenerates in mere opinion, since Kant forbad it from dealing in fact with things. When this humanity detached from the cosmos is invented, an immense solitude ravaged the spirits in Europe. It was inevitable that soon after would appear a Freud to manage solitude, reinforcing it with an individual psychic apparatus.

            But during the 17th Century there already appeared a solution for all this separatism. It is, of course, the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (2008). Spinozism is the heir of a long tradition of “damned”, which began during a forgotten Egyptian immanence, whose Greek heir is Heraclitus and its impermanent becoming; its late followers, the Stoics, the Hermetic sorcerers and alchemists, Giordano Bruno and Spinoza’s preceptor, Franciscus van den Enden (JOB, 2013).

            With Spinoza, there is indeed a pure immanence: a univocity between God, Nature and substance, a mind immanent in the world and an ontology marked by an Ethics: if from bad encounters a diminution of potency is obtained, generating sadness and servitude, good encounters lead to an increase in potency, joy, freedom and bliss, i.e., an apprehension of immanence by man’s mode of expression.

            In this way, Spinoza solves various problems: creator (Natura Naturans) and creature (Natura Naturata) are immanent: man stops being separated from the cosmos. Philosophy deals directly with things, and emerges from them. It is an entire philosophical search from the first (imagination) to the third kind of knowledge (intuition), necessarily passing through the second (reflection), problematizing inadequate ideas towards adequate ideas and, on its turn, to bliss, where we perceive ourselves as immanent to God. Witchcraft maybe could arrive at immanence only by the demonic way, but all too often the denial of Christian morality only generated an immature “everything is permitted”. This stance would be more intensely mediatized with the magician Aleister Crowley (2017, p. 33), whose following motto was misunderstood, because it was reproduced only in part. The famous Law of Thelema, present in the Book of Law, written in 1904 by Crowley[2], is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will. There is no other law but Do what thou wilt.”

            Crowley’s law may have similarities with the bliss in Spinoza’s Ethics, written centuries before. However, if the philosopher cultivates an impeccable ontological rigor, Crowley’s text is confusing. In Spinoza, passions must be governed by good encounters, putting man as “lord of his passions”, what is different from an individual moral, unfolding an Ethics that would never be only from the order of the “individual”.

            Spinozism, as predicted Spinoza himself, was considered a heresy by the Church, putting the lens polisher in excellent historical company. After him, the thinkers of immanence would be (in a fashion) Leibniz, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, to mention the more obvious examples. However, to advance in our argument, we must now discuss melancholy.


“The spirit only becomes free at the point where it ceases to be invoked as a support.”
Kafka

            The shift in the imaginary relative to melancholy is relevant to our question. Melancholy, up to before Modern Age, was, in general terms, a sort of preparation for enthusiasm (from the Greek enthousiasmos), something like “divine inspiration”, “being possessed by God” etc. It was a sort of method for priest of various lineages that involved, during a preparatory time, isolation, reflection, sexual and food abstinence, to achieve revelation and suchlike. From the Cartesian century onwards, melancholy acquired increasingly pathological contours (CHAUÍ, 2000).

            Allied to the pathologization of melancholy, there is an entire context of “disenchantment of the world”, generated by the Inquisition, by Illuminism, by the Scientific Revolution and all the separatism we mentioned before. If we can, to a certain point, take part in the Weberian choir and name this process “disenchantment of the world”, we must be careful: what is understood by “secularization”, such as the loss of religious influence in the social sphere, is relative. According to Hanegraaff (1999), there was, along with the New Age Movement, a shift in the institutionalization of religions to private spiritualities, with their individual symbolisms. There is an abundance of contemporary examples: Paulo Coelho, The Celestine Prophecy, The Secret, The Power of Now, etc. In other words, many people no longer follow an institutionalized religion, but feel part of a diffuse group of spiritualists around the planet.

            Hanegraaff (2012) also says that New Age spiritualists live in a scientifized reality; however, their belief system creates a separate reality, where the spiritual can manifest. We understand that, given a history of the “West” so marked by transcendental ideas, many spiritualists locate the spiritual in any transcendence available. Our operation is Spinozian, consequently immanent, and involves finding God – and the demons of the witches – in this very world.

            The disenchantment of the world will generate a cosmovision exceedingly concrete. The invisibles tend to be abolished from the constructed notion of reality. For instance, Newtonian physics rationalizes the invisible with the concept of gravity. It must be said that Newton was not a Newtonian, in the sense his imaginary interacted harmoniously with science, theology, philosophy and alchemy, and was not even a “mechanist”. It is only Descartes who can, in fact, be considered mechanist, since his mechanics necessarily involved the local relation of parts. On the other hand, Newton, with the force of gravity, postulated an action at a distance or non-local. Newton only published his scientific texts during his life, the smaller part of his complete works (DOBBS, 1994). The irony in this is that this “edition” of Newton’s works, precisely the “last of the magicians” – to use the famous discourse of Keynes (2002) –, was a considerable vector for the process of Illuminist rationalization of the disenchantment of the world. Quantum mechanics would generate later a new version of the presence of the invisibles – even more subtle and transformative – for the scientific field. Half a century after its appearance, it is aggregated by the New Age movement as a scientific justification for spirituality, even if occasionally with little or no consistency (HANEGRAAFF, 2013).

            The second half of the 20th Century witnessed the so-called “pharmacological revolution”, where psychiatry no longer treated only “madness”, prescribing drugs for any kind of psychic discomfort: alcoholism, adult and infantile neurosis etc. (GRANATO, 2018). From 1990 onwards, a new boom would occur due to the arrival of new antidepressants such as Prozac.

            It is at this point that we intend to promote our resonances: the consequence of the “abolition of the invisibles” in Illuminism and the constitution of a world increasingly concrete is that the individuals who perceive those invisible are considered insane (schizophrenic hearing voices, seeing dragons, etc.). And with the pathologization of melancholy, the need to be happy at any cost – since it is an imperative of capitalist productivity – creates in the imaginary the need for antidepressants.

            Once again it is necessary to link disenchantment to capitalist logic: Silvia Federeci (2017) shows how the process of Inquisition, with its inherent feminicide, assured the ascension of capitalism in the work relations. The disempowerment of the feminine, intuition, and the invisibles refer us to the disenchantment of the world. Naturally, in the scientific process there is creativity, intuition, and with it, necessarily there is a certain feminine. However, it is inevitable that this feminine is weakened and tamed. The “tamed feminine” gains its diagnostic evidence in the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, with the advent of PMS: the “witch” has its social permission to emerge only on the days before menstruation...

            It is necessary to learn the context of the second half of the 20th to the present day: the explosion of illegal drug use and the increase in the use of psychiatric drugs are part of the same movement (GRANATO, 2018). This movement would be the use of chemical products from various provenances to alter “mental states”. The “disenchanted” tend to use legal drugs and the New Age “enchanted”, illegal ones, even if the transit between both positions is immense, according to the policy performed by the user on his social field.

            This is our question: the passage of alchemy to chemistry, a fractal to the passage of witchcraft to science, with its taxonomization of knowledges and life, disconnected man from cosmos, condemning him to an unhappy life. It is necessary to consume everything, including all kinds of drugs, legal and illegal, to stand this fragmented world and individual. This is exactly the historical moment of the “medicalization of life”. So, what is to be done?
           

“You are the exercise, the task. No student far and wide.”
Kafka
           
            Foucault (2002) affirms that the immanence between words and things survived in literature. We can expand this idea and bring art to life. But it is Deleuze and Guattari (1997) who will provide the great ontological step and promote a becoming-woman. The authors defend that every becoming is a minority and passes necessarily through a becoming- woman, and add there is no “becoming-man”, since “man” is the majority. In the same text, Deleuze and Guattari whisper sometimes in our ears: “we sorcerers”, proposing an immanent demonic alliance, instead of a familiar, transcendent alliance. This philosophy develops Henri Bergson’s concept (2009) of virtual, the non-temporal space that comprehend coexistent times and individual and cosmic consciousness, all of them immanent. The philosopher goes as far as saying that when somebody perceives the virtual of other individual it could be understood as a ghost or spirit.

            When we mentioned that Deleuze and Guattari are affiliated to witchcraft (JOB, 2019), our strategies become clearer we will regain the invisibles without denying science and the technological world. If the pharmaceutical industry turned medicine in something “diabolical”, now it is appropriate to allow prescriptions to become demonic, in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari.

            What the process of Illuminism and disenchantment of the world achieved was a flattening of the spectrum of reality, or, in other worlds, an “ontological reduction”. The illusory idea of transcendence was installed as an ontology of obedience: a transcendent God, State, kings, parents, chiefs, etc., are the avatars of this transcendence, preparing the subject removed from the cosmos to obedience. This sad passion has the legal and illegal chemical sedation we mentioned above as one of its developments.

            The virtual, as a reinsertion of the hidden forces in reality, allows us to access again this wider ontological spectrum, building possibilities (JOB, 2013). But we must refine our strategy.
            Anarchist Sufi Hakim Bey (2001) proposes a mystical and ontological anarchy. With his Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), he says that revolution should not even be desired, and proposes in its place the uprising. The TAZ would be any provisional libertarian space: a party, a picnic, a study reunion, as long as it is hierarchy-free, promoting freedom. As we saw in this article, the docile body obeys the institutions – with their transcendent aspirations – and is permeated and ruled by these institutions, including the medical ones. A space of freedom invites the body to dance, to decoagulate, to use a Hermetic term, the “individual”, making them conscious of the flux to which they belong, and their immanence.

            Our resistance happens in an immanent way, including between science and witchcraft. Our medicine is life as a work of art, the cultivation of freedom, a festive nomadism. To inhabit the cosmos from the perspective of immanence, along with Nature and culture, allow us to consider ourselves one with the cosmos, a cosmos which includes the sea, plants, animals, automobiles, skyscrapers, pills, etc. The moment of the Luddites is long past. Our concern is to use technology in an ethical way, aware of the immanence between us and the cosmos and everything inside it. It would be naive to deny any chemical medicine, but perhaps we could find another approach, for instance, in psychiatry, where medication should be negotiated between client and doctor.

            Aware of the virtual invisibles, conjurable in the actual, as well as the possibility of transmitting these information live by social networks via um smartphone, we comprehend that esoterism, philosophy and science inhabit a continuum of thought and intuition and the next steps of the cosmic dance must intensify the confluence of the vibrational lines that compose this continuum.


Bibliographical References
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[1] All the epigraphs opening the sections of this article are by Franz Kafka (2017), from the book “Zürau Aphorisms”.